You know how important it is to maintain patient privacy—but you may not be aware of all of the new ways by which it might be stolen away from you.

Medical ID theft can occur in two ways: either from the inside with the involvement of employees or at the point of care where patients present themselves as being someone else so as to gain expensive treatments or drugs without having to pay for them, Ester Horowitz, CMC, CITRMS, CIISA says. The bad news is that often “the very people we trust the most are actually the ones committing the fraud and it could have been going on for years,” she warns.

Illicit cash: Although rare, when medical ID theft is an inside job, “it means that someone who works for a covered entity is taking the IDs and passing them or using them for money,” says Horowitz. “The street...